the easter bunny is satanic
dancing with devils - april 5, 2008
this is the passover lesson so i’m sure he’s got something special cooked up. apparently we’re going to have a little music today? that’s a scary thought.
personally i don’t have any problems with people observing the old feast days, it’s a fun way to connect with a shared practice across the centuries, but i don’t think treating them as mandatory is very productive. i grew up with some christians who adhered to the old testament food laws and again, although i have no personal issues with it, i don’t think it should be expected of other christians - the vision of the animals shown to peter should be compelling enough evidence that under christ all things are made clean. but if you want to not eat pork or shellfish bc of your religious convictions that’s fine. just so we’re on the same page about these things and no one wonders why i don’t talk more about his obsession with feast days.
“this is very important” drink
we’re starting with a wonderful singer, someone called elvis presley sayer. i couldn’t find anything about him online but he said it was a privilege to be with jim and other people of like mind so i feel pretty comfortable making my assumptions. also now some rando in the congregation will be playing a trumpet badly indoors. “three times for the assembly” pretty mid if i’m honest. god would say you should practice more
“this is very important” drink
interesting new piece of knowledge for me, jim believes in immersion - biblically accurate, to be fair - but he says it needs to be “flowing water” which is not necessarily important. jesus was baptized in a river, sure, but baptism was already practiced in judaism and would have been understood as a ritual act of cleansing. the baths - mikveh - outside the temple would not have been running water
“this is so important” drink
jim is pretty mad about people who think jesus told us to love our enemies. this is not a revelation but he subscribes very tightly to the old laws bc he needs permission to kill the people he doesn’t like and jesus doesn’t give it to him.
“this is very important” drink
jim is talking about jubilee years now, which were certainly part of israelite law. there’s no indication that the law was actually observed, but it’s in the text. the idea is every 7th year you let the fields recover and in the 50th year - 7*7+1 - all land reverts back to the original owners. it’s a nice idea and a good strategy to keep from depleting your soil but was it ever enacted? probably not.
jim claims the bible says the sun will never set on ephraim and that’s how you know ephraim is modern-day england. i can’t find a verse that says what he’s saying, and also the british empire has lost a bunch of territories so the sun DOES go down on the british empire. is god not big enough to keep that from happening?
now we’re upset that professors focus on a specific field or discipline lol. jim also lies again about what the word “bible” means as a way to insult the catholics. i have no idea where this claim comes from. bible means book lol that’s all.
we’re now treated to an extremely racist joke that i will not reproduce here. it wasn’t funny the first time and it certainly isn’t worth sharing a second time.
okay now we get the excellent point made by jim that the word easter is not in the original greek texts of the new testament. i don’t know anyone who would dispute that point with him, it’s prima facie ridiculous but hey when he’s right, he’s right.
“this is very important” drink
jim has some very regressive opinions on how people should handle substance addiction. another appearance of jim’s “common sense” mug. i don’t really understand the genesis of this bit but it’s annoying.
back to casting aspersions on churches that are 501c3. also making some very unique conclusions about how jesus used parables. he seems to be convinced that jesus told parables to keep the non-whites in his audience from understanding.
“this is very important” drink
jim now makes a comment about how all the gold and silver has been stolen by the jews but eventually god’s people will have it. i seem to remember a lot of soon-to-be-deceased people having their gold/valuables stolen by white people once before, around 90 years ago.
“diversity and tolerance is jewish communism” succinctly sums up an awful lot of far-right “thinkers”
“infestation” talk and a mention of rhodesia. great stuff. more fearmongering about black on white crime. jim says he’s voting for yahweh for president and he seems very pleased with himself afterward. he’s also trying to make a delineation between being god’s children and god’s creation and frankly i think most people would say that children are the creation of their parents. i don’t know how he breaks that out differently. he then asserts that all 12 disciples except for judas were benjaminites, but i don’t see that in the text.
we now get a rant about santa claus. jim is very concerned that people would believe the sleigh was pulled by flying reindeer. i’m just glad we have someone out there willing to speak truth to power and really expose the flying-reindeer lobby for the peddlers of false dreams they really are.
hunting for easter eggs is “more sex brought in by the catholic church”
we now get a claim - as far as i can tell, totally ahistorical - that ireland refused to fight in world war 1 against germany but actually supplied their ships off the coast. the wikipedia page suggests otherwise
jim predicts the sneaky way bad actors will try to gain access to larger platforms. “ many times i’ve said, ‘let me come into your church and let me talk to your church. let me in, if i’m so wrong. don’t you teach to turn your cheek? don’t you teach to love your enemy? why aren’t you inviting me into your pulpit and to speak and bring what yahweh to your congregation” i hate people like this. joker-ass wickstrom
new one to me - wickstrom asserts that the name “jesus” comes from the “catholic”(latin?) word “isis” and that’s completely invented lol. his name was yeshua which was a very common name. the greeks translated it as iesous and we’ve made it into jesus because hebrew didn’t have a j sound. yeshua means joshua, there’s a whole book named after one of those guys.
some classic alex jones behaviour, telling anecdotes about unnamed people that make him look smart and “judeo-christians” look dumb and uneducated. i think he’s probably a little wounded that he has no academic credentials to lean on for authority so he attacks people for being less intelligent than he is as a defense. just a theory.
big claim from jim here, again very reminiscent of alex “i speak for tens of millions of people, many who hide in their closets and are afraid to say it” the classic right wing move of claiming to speak for a silent majority when in fact you are a vocal minority.
“who are the greatest farmers in the world? the white race”
jim claims that “they” admit that the fastest growing movement in the world is the identity movement. i’m not entirely sure how to best quantify that but i’ll say i doubt the growth of british israelite white supremacy outpaced that of islam in 2008. if it did then we’re in more trouble than i thought.
although i’ve said it many times previously, it never ceases to amaze me how happy jim is to editorialize scripture to suit his purposes. just adding words where he wants and suggesting that the scribes were dishonest, or that the text has already been editorialised to take out the name of yahweh. if you can’t trust that the scribes wrote it down accurately how can you trust any of the text! it just really bothers me to see him be so cavalier while also saying the text is the literal word of god.
we’re back to his retranslating of genesis to make the story of eve and the serpent be about the serpent having adult relations with eve. i’ve addressed this elsewhere but i did confer with my father on this one since he has a degree in biblical hebrew and the way wickstrom is interpreting the verses in genesis is absolutely without merit. it’s the fundamental assertion of his worldview, that cain is not descended from adam and eve but instead eve and the devil, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny at all.
it remains funny to me that he is so opposed to the idea of the rapture. i also didn’t grow up with rapture theology, and it is frankly a non-biblical idea, but it’s funny that he’s so into end times stuff and aliens but he doesn’t buy the rapture.
now we’re getting more into current day issues and jim breaks out a list of jewish people in the bush administration. always great when people start making lists of prominent jewish people right? historically has never been a problem. jim is mad that there wasn’t a liaison to the white community in the bush admin and to that i say cry more. “why isn’t there a white history month” shut the fuck up
jim is now talking about how people mistranslate verses and how you can’t rely on only scripture bc the people who put together the dictionaries of ancient greek and hebrew are colluding to hide the truth of how to read aramaic i guess. the two verses he brings up specifically are titus 1:14 and ephesians 4:14. interestingly enough, he mistranslates both these verses lol in titus 1:14 the verse ends with “men turning away from the truth” and jim says that phrase the truth should be interpreted as “yahweh”. this is untrue, the word used for “the truth” in greek is aletheian, which does not mean or imply yahweh, it means truth or fact. he then says in ephesians 4:14 that when it says we are no longer infants, that that means children of jacob/israel. that is not what the word used for infants - nepioi - means, it means children or ignorant people. basically someone with a child’s grasp on things. so he editorialises two verses that he claims other people are editorialising.
wickstrom asserts that something jesus says to some jewish followers in john - whoever sins is the slave of sin - was also said to cain in genesis. i went and looked at genesis 4 and no, it is not. i’m not sure if maybe he has another verse or something to lean on here but the story of cain and abel is genesis 4 and god doesn’t say anything like this to cain.
jim now pulls a story from the infancy gospel of thomas, an apocryphal work dating to the mid-2nd century ce to demonstrate how kid jesus brought back a friend of his who fell off a roof and died. kid jesus also curses a different child so that he dies in this text. kid jesus sucked lol
we have another insertion of speech into the mouth of jesus. pretty wild how arrogant jim is to just change holy writ like this. john 8:37 jesus says he knows that the jews are the seed of abraham, and the greek confirms this. jim says that in 8:37 jesus says he knows the jews CLAIM to be the seed of abraham, a significant distinction. jim’s version is not supported by the greek, which he would know if he was capable of reading greek. or even english frankly.
“and all jews are devils in flesh bodies, by the way”
we get a jasher reference again, and just for the benefit of the people who may not have seen my previous dealing with the book of jasher: the book of jasher is referenced in the old testament but there are zero known legitimate copies. the book wickstrom is referring to - and regularly quotes directly - is a forgery composed sometime in the 18th century. there should be no argument that it has any authority or reliability as scripture.
we now get into some casual hatred of immigrants as we’re wrapping up for the day. he, like alex jones, is very invested in the idea of humanity going “interstellar” as alex would say. i wonder who will get left behind on earth?
we also get some “we need real men” shit that continues to hold such power over the dumbass right wing.
some racism about african people now that i will not detail further. he’s so fucking racist it’s kinda breathtaking. just an old man screaming into the void about how he doesn’t like to see children who are mixed race. eat my asshole
jim now says that santa claus is really satan claus and that an old dictionary called him saint nick. saint nick means the devil apparently, and not - as they would have you believe - saint nickolas, the real guy who seems to be the origin of the santa claus myth. idk man some of the stuff he gets animated about just makes no sense.
we close with a guy doing a mediocre version of amazing grace that jim hums along to - much in the way that i would imagine trump would hum along to a song that he pretends to know and everyone knows he SHOULD know. it was funny to listen to, at least. this concludes the passover lesson and so too our article. until next time.